The imperfectability of internet intelligence

This is funny. I accidentally typed the blog's URL into the Google bar rather than the address bar.

One of the strings that came up was this site: All Consuming. I can't believe I didn't find this earlier, considering how obsessive I am.

Its mission statement:

All Consuming is a website that visits recently updated weblogs every hour, checking them for links to books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Sense, and other book sites. Every book on this site has a list of all the weblogs that have mentioned it, and every weblog that has mentioned books in the past also has a page here listing which books it has mentioned. If you have a weblog, search for it here to see if we've picked anything up from it yet.

Good idea, poor execution.

It turns out nine books I've discussed have found their way into the annals of allconsuming.net. NINE. I guess I talk books more than I thought. I know, however, that I've never written a proper review.

As it turns out, I mostly mention books I've never read. They come up in passing, or as part of a longer tirade that has nothing to do with the books themselves.

Example: The graphic novel Watchmen. My statement, regarding Darren Aronofsky's next movie: "An adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen (a favorite of my friend Ben, I've never read it)"

I have to conclude that no human being has ever seen the blogs this site's crawler flags.

I call Breakfast of Champions "the best book ever" as part of a larger invective about my life.

The closest thing I have to a REAL review was my discussion of Robert Sapolski's two books, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and A Primate's Memoir. That post isn't on All Consuming anymore because links get deleted after a month. A Google cache is all that remains of books I actually had opinions of.

Here is All Consuming's page for my blog, highlighting the absurdity of this system.

I think the idea is solid, and the site could work. But it needs a liberal dose of human scrutiny--a little nudging from its flesh and blood handlers. To be fair, I know they're not just looking for reviews. I think people might genuinely be interested that Aronofsky is adapting Watchmen for a movie. I know I was.

But the posts in which I only reference Vonnegut books to brag about how well read I am should be culled. Honestly, they should be stricken from this blog as well.

So let it be written; So let it be done.

All Consuming has the potential to become a magnificent tree of knowledge and opinion--the editors just need to do some pruning.

It occurs to me that, since I just quoted a previous blog that had a link back to Amazon, AllConsuming.net's all-seeing blog crawler will flag this post as well, posting not a rumination on Watchmen, but a criticism of the site itself. This is funny.